1. Change the name to 'purge drinking'

Why focus on the process rather than the outcome? By rebranding what sounds like a fun night out – let's binge! – to emphasise its deleterious after-effects – ie involuntarily divesting oneself of eight Bacardi Breezers and a takeaway on all fours in a bus shelter at 3am – we could curb a worrying trend among young people. If that works then we can start calling passive smoking "getting cancer from someone else" and rebrand "gambling" as "losing".

2. Sack Andrew Lansley

There is as yet no proven causal link between the rise in binge drinking and the appointment of Lansley, but when the health secretary takes the side of the drinks industry on minimum alcohol pricing and has to be overruled by Downing Street, it's difficult to believe he's completely happy in his job. Why doesn't he go work for a drinks conglomerate? Then he could wake up every day with a song in his heart.

3. Employ nudge theory

The idea of influencing decision-making through "choice architecture" is popular in Tory circles. Instead of hectoring the middle classes – who do their binge drinking at home – we might subconsciously induce them to imbibe less just by obliging importers to name popular varietal wines after parts of the liver and pancreas. The "lslets of Langerhans" or the "Tranverse Fissure" could easily be mistaken for the exotic locations of Australian vineyards, but the message will have been planted.

4. Launch a campaign to encourage binge knitting

Knitting keeps your hands busy and your mind off booze, and its adherents claim it's as addictive as crack cocaine. It could even become a new form of popular anti-social behaviour among young people, once they're tired of all that purge drinking. Of course binge knitting may well have serious harmful effects of its own, but it's going to be a long time before anybody stumps up the funding for a study.

5. Stop buying your round

The round system – whereby each member of a group buys drinks for the entire group in turn – has long been blamed for the excessive consumption of alcohol in pubs, but it can be difficult to change such a deep-seated tradition, based as it is on generosity, conviviality and fairness. Breaking the cycle requires brave dissent. For the good of the nation, somebody has to be the first to stop buying rounds for good. That's me. But somebody has to be second. Don't leave me hanging here.